Top ten Apple rumours of all time

What do you get when you cross a notoriously tight-lipped computer company with rabidly fanatical users? A whole lot of gossip, speculation and hearsay, that's what. Thirty years of Apple Computer has seen the company rise, fall and rise again like a kind of technological Jesus Christ -- there's been plenty to talk about.

Putting aside the surreal story of the return of Steve Jobs in 1997 to the company he founded back in 1976, Apple's products themselves have been the ripest material for rumour-mongers. From the '90s doomsayers who predicted the complete collapse of "beleaguered" Apple to today's rampant iPhone speculation, Apple has stimulated more imagination in Internet forums than any other company. You might even say that Apple is the only computer manufacturer to have inspired its own fan fiction.

Take our hand as we frolic back through the last 30 years of Apple rumours. Some turned out to be true, but most were wild fabrications built on nothing but wishful thinking and too much peyote.

A long-running rumour that surfaces roughly every eight months. The motive behind this story is often nothing more sophisticated than the fact that both Apple and Nintendo have exceptionally faithful fan bases. The temptation to stir both camps into action, bickering over the same rumour, is apparently too much to resist.

The reasons suggested by gossip-mongers include the similar styles of the companies -- both are perceived as charming outsiders in their industries -- and the dearth of games on the Mac. What better way to revive the Mac as a games machine than to buy Nintendo's back catalogue and future expertise?

Finally, there is the Pippin angle. Apple did launch a console in 1995, the Bandai Pippin. Although the console was a raging failure, pundits often hint that Apple has been biding its time before delivering payback on Sony for crushing the Pippin with the PlayStation. This is, of course, utter rubbish. The Pippin was never a viable competitor in this field and was discontinued after only a limited release in Japan and the US.

Verdict: So utterly outlandish and fiendishly provocative is this rumour that it deserves top spot.

This is another longstanding rumour. The story goes that Apple realises the only thing between it and global domination is that the Mac operating system doesn't run on a generic PC. Journalists, analysts and forum posters bring this rumour up roughly once every month, insisting that Apple should sell its OS to PC buyers.

Aside from the technical nightmare involved in supporting the unknown hardware in millions of PCs out there, the rumour-mongers ignore the evidence that Apple is a hardware company and its OS, like iTunes, is not in itself a big profit-driver. Apple has a vested interest in allowing OSX to run only on Apple hardware.

Running Mac OS exclusively on Apple hardware also means the company has the advantage of knowing, for the most part, what hardware its users are running. This allows it to concentrate on performance and stability with known configurations -- something Microsoft's Windows has always struggled with. There is also the small matter of Steve Jobs' personal pride -- would the man who called Dell's computers "uninnovative beige boxes" release OSX to the PC market?

Verdict: The idea would be so counter-productive and financially damaging for Apple that we doubt the company has ever seriously considered it.

The Apple Newton was launched in 1993, years before the Palm Pilot. The project was as ambitious as they come. The Newton team not only created a new kind of portable computer, but also combined several early technologies, such as PC Card slots, advanced handwriting recognition, a touch-screen display and a stylus. Steve Jobs axed the Newton on his return to Apple, but that hasn't stopped endless predictions of its return in some form.

The fuel behind this rumour is the belief of many Newton owners that the Newton was wildly ahead of its time. Indeed, it fared extremely well when we pitted it against a brand-new UMPC, and just this month there has been talk of Apple embedding OSX in portable devices that sound potentially Newton-like.

Verdict: The Newton itself is unlikely to return, but some of the technology used in the Newton has appeared in OSX's handwriting-recognition features.

BeOS is a little-known, largely discontinued operating system that was the buzz of the mid '90s. When Apple decided to abandon development on its new OS, the failed Copland project, it urgently needed to buy in a replacement. BeOS was a fledgeling OS with limited support that nonetheless was designed from the ground up for multithreaded application and multiple processors.

Compared to MacOS at the time, BeOS was extremely attractive and Apple offered Be $120 million for the system. Be's owner reportedly held out for much more money and Apple refused to pay, turning instead to NeXT and Steve Jobs.

Verdict: This one turned out to be true

After the launch of OSX, the rumour mill worked itself up over the possibility that Apple was secretly maintaining an Intel version of OSX in a basement room in Cupertino. Because OSX was based on the NeXT OS, and the NeXT OS ran on Intel hardware, it didn't seem impossible that Apple would have evolved the Intel version alongside the public PowerPC version.

Although no one had any hard evidence, forum posters often made references to this mythical beast, the Intel version of OSX. These speculators seemed to think that Apple would release a PC version of OSX (see the entry at 2) and take over the PC market by stealth.

Most Mac users thought this was totally improbable, but in 2005, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had indeed been secretly programming both PowerPC and Intel versions of Mac OSX for five years. What followed was not a version of OSX for PCs, but a migration from Power PC to Intel processors in Apple Computers.

Verdict: Shockingly true. Apple kept the Intel version of OSX secret for a staggering five years. Its eventual release vindicated millions of rumour-mongers across the world.

UPDATE: Looks like we were wrong on this one -- Apple did eventually announce the iPhone. We're as surprised as we are delighted! Here's what we foolishly thought just weeks before the announcement:

It's such a worn-down-to-the-rim rumour that some have speculated the iPhone is just an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Steve Jobs to keep journalists busy. Barely a day passes without some analyst predicting or decrying the arrival of an Apple mobile phone -- or some obscure Far Eastern factory claiming to be making it.

This wonderfully elaborate rumour plays on the fact that some analysts think it's common sense that mobile phones should also be MP3 players. This belief relies on the myth of convergence that has been peddled to the consumer electronics buyer for decades: why have a mobile phone, a computer and an MP3 player, when you can have all three squeezed into one impossibly complicated and power-hungry device?

Verdict: Totally misguided. We'll believe it when we see it -- and no, we don't mean your Photoshop mock-up.

Even if you ignore the legal problems this might dredge up on account of Apple Computer's uneasy truce with Apple Records, the computer company has very limited experience of marketing bands, let alone picking out talent. Arguably, iTunes could do most of the work for Apple. It would simply have to sign artists for a minimal fee in exchange for a healthy cut of any sales the band made through iTunes.

It's certainly an interesting possibility, but, whether it was successful or not, it could provoke traditional record companies to abandon iTunes in rebellion. The record industry has a good track record for freaking out over this kind of thing. There's also the problem of dedicating time and energy to this when Apple has so many other projects on the go.

Verdict: Certainly interesting, but extremely unlikely

Officially the most mocked-up device after the iPhone, the widescreen video iPod does seem like a viable product. Apple has reportedly filed patents on a touch-screen user interface that covers the entire surface of an iPod, leading many to suspect that a future model will feature an LCD across its front surface.

Verdict: It's very likely we'll see the widescreen video iPod sometime soon. 

Ten years after the quirky 20th Anniversary Mac, bloggers were convinced that Apple would release something really special for its 30th anniversary. Some imagined a Mac made entirely of gold, others a sentient robot made of iPods. As it turned out, Apple announced no commemorative products on that day, nor afterwards.

Verdict: The most disappointing day in Apple's history. Still, there's always the 40th Anniversary Mac to look forward to.

Given Steve Jobs' prominent position at Disney, and his history with Pixar, it makes sense to many rumour-mongers that Apple will at some point, probably very soon, buy Disney. There is about as much credibility to this rumour as the Nintendo Apple merger, but still it persists.

The main reason this idea is so appealing is that it would cement Apple's return to glory in the minds of many Mac fans. Disney is an iconic company, representative of the American dream and of capitalism's global success. What better trophy could Apple hope to own than this? The concept is clearly an appealing one, but that doesn't make it true.

Verdict: The poisoned apple won't be edited out of Snow White and replaced with a Windows logo anytime soon.

What are your favourite Apple rumours of all time? Did we leave some out? Let us know, post a comment below.